China: grave symptoms

Published Dec 21, 2005 11:23 PM

Partisans of China’s revolutionary transformation and its rise from
colonial slavery to the status of a rapidly developing, independent nation are
justifiably wary of imperialist-inspired criticisms. No matter whether China
pursues a left course, as it did in the days of Mao Zedong, or turns to the
right and allows capitalist market mechanisms to operate inside the
workers’ state, as it has done for the last three decades, the
imperialists will never be satisfied until they can thoroughly penetrate
China’s economic arteries and bend it to their will.

China’s
growth in the last quarter century has been stupendous. However, it is important
that progressives understand the debilitating side of these market reforms and
the deep problems they are presenting for the workers and farmers of China, who
have been the backbone of the revolution.

Two events this year illustrate
the grave consequences of rapid, market-oriented industrialization. One was the
awful disaster in February at the Sunjiawan coal mine in Fuxin, Liaoning
province. Some 203 miners were killed and several dozen injured. It helped turn
a spotlight once again on the terribly hazardous conditions faced by miners in
China.

Last year, more than 5,000 Chinese coal miners were killed on the
job in mining disasters. The Chinese government admits this came to a fatality
rate per ton of coal that is 100 times that of the United States. China has many
older mines and outmoded equipment. Its mining is labor intensive, compared with
the more mechanized systems available in the imperialist countries. That would
account for some of this, but the casualty rate is nevertheless
staggering.

What especially concerns progressives is that the bulk of
these deaths occurred in privately owned mines, where the profit motive is the
driving force, and where rich owners can bribe officials to ignore safety
violations. This quest for profit is likely to increase as China opens up more
opportunities for foreign investment. For example, the British investment
analysis firm Battelle says in a report called “China’s Coal
Industry: Evolution and Oppor tunities,” that foreign capital can now find
“huge opportunities for investment in China’s coal industry
development.”

In 2003, says the Battelle report, China was the
world’s second-largest exporter of coal. It is now ready to embark on
“a vast program of expansion.” (Only a summary of this analysis of
China’s coal industry is available online, at www.battelle.org. The full
report costs its corporate customers over $850.)

Now comes the huge
explosion on Nov. 13 at the Jilin Petrochemical plant in northeast China,
followed by a spill of benzene, nitrobenzene and other highly toxic chemicals
into the Songhua River. Millions of people were left without safe drinking water
when, a week later, the spill reached the large city of Harbin downstream. The
Chinese government mobilized to provide many tons of bottled water, but the
damage to the population and the environment could still be enormous.

Because of a cover-up that lasted nearly a week, during which time the
people along the river had little knowledge of the approa ching danger, the top
environmental official in China has been fired. Beijing made a formal apology to
Russia, which lies downstream along the path of the poisonous chemicals. By late
December, the Chinese were working around the clock in subfreezing temperatures
to build a containment dam above the Russian city of Khabarovsk that could
reduce the spill’s impact.

Why did this explosion happen? No explan
ation has been given, but it is certainly likely that the heated pace of
development of the chemical industry contributed to it. And there, too, foreign
capital is involved.

Union Carbide is
infamous for what it did to the people of Bhopal, India, in 1984, when a toxic
gas leak from one of its plants there killed 8,000 people and injured 120,000
more.

China’s Communist Party has introduced market reforms, it
says, in order to accelerate its development and build socialism. But the market
is not just a stimulus; it creates a class of millionaires that corrupts the
economic and political structures and divides the people, undermining the class
solidarity that is the bedrock of socialist construction.

None of this can
have escaped the attention of China’s leaders, who are skilled and
experienced. They themselves have admitted that there were 74,000 “social
disturbances” last year. But are there forces prepared to mobilize the
advanced elements among the workers and farmers to engage in a struggle to turn
the situation around politically and economically and push back the forces of
capitalism, which are endangering the foundations of the workers’ state?
The fate of one quarter of the world’s people is involved.

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